Anime? (DragonBall and Pokemon)

kenisu3000 · **Joined:** Fri Dec 28, 2012 2:46 am **Posts:** 41

What's the stance here about overseas material, such as stuff composed for anime? In particular, DragonBall/Z/GT (Shunsuke Kikuchi and Akito Tokunaga), as well as Pocket Monsters/Pokemon (Shinji Miyazaki) feature a ton of music so amazing that it's perfectly tragic so much of it has never made it to CD.

In fact, a couple of years ago, Pikachu Records finally released two large volumes of music, which gave us all but a handful of the material composed for the TV series... and as grateful as I was for everything we got, that missing handful makes it all the more frustrating. I get that these volumes were always only meant to be "best of" albums, but why come so close to releasing everything, and just decide to quit right there?

I understand that there's probably unbelievable licensing hurdles there that make this next-to-impossible, but I did think it was worth asking about.

TerraEpon · **Joined:** Thu Sep 07, 2006 5:45 pm **Posts:** 785

In such cases, I really doubt US companies like Intrada would do it when they haven't been done in Japan.
Of course it'd be nice to see non-Japanese releases of a lot of things -- hell given Ghibli's relationship with Disney one almost hopes Intrada could release some of their scores that never got US releases, but I doubt that's going to happen.

Basil · **Joined:** Wed Apr 22, 2009 1:40 pm **Posts:** 402

I'd be down for these.

ReddiShadow · **Joined:** Sun Jun 26, 2011 8:22 am **Posts:** 39

It would be nice, especially since Japan is a lot better with releasing OSTs for things than the West (there was a running gag on a Doctor Who forum I used to post on that if Who was Japanese, there'd be three albums per episode and a tie-in image single), really a lot of the work is done. All that remains is licensing the rights to reprint the Japan-only stuff in the West. Not saying that the licensing part is going to be easy, my point is it'd be less work than usual. Of course it's unlikely that even big name stuff like the two you mentioned would get picked up, but as long as we're waxing lyrical about our ideal world, I'd like to see the Outlaw Star albums given a Western printing.

(Of course this idea is purely limited to the original Japanese music, when the American dub has new music e.g. Dragonball Z, Digimon, Power Rangers etc that's a whole 'nother can of worms.)

kenisu3000 · **Joined:** Fri Dec 28, 2012 2:46 am **Posts:** 41

Well, what I'm talking about is not so much a Western re-issue of existing CDs, as picking up the slack from the Japanese CDs. It is true that nowadays, anime companies are typically very, very good about releasing BGM CDs (not because they care about their fans, but because it's all about milking the cash cow dry), but that's not true of many older series like DragonBall, and even Pocket Monsters still suffers from unreleased-itis on occasion.

As far as I can tell, the Pokemon movie soundtracks nowadays, as a rule, release all but a small handful of tracks from their respective films on each CD, but some of the earlier movies (namely, 2, 3, 4 and 5) suffered immensely. There are cues from Movie 2 (Revelation Lugia) that I would give two fingers and a toe for. Well, okay, maybe I don't exactly want them badly enough to mutilate myself, but I do really, really want them. And where the TV series is concerned... well, not only have they released not much more than a few scanty notes of music from the newest series, Best Wishes, but it took us 13 years to get some of the BGM in those two volumes I mentioned in the OP. (And I know around here, waiting a measly 13 years is nothing, but still...) It's like they don't think the TV score is worth releasing.

And as for DragonBall... well, Columbia Music Japan sure knows how to cheese off fans. Every single time there's a new CD release of the Kikuchi score, they wind up recycling a boatload of tracks from previous discs, instead of making it a point to give us stuff we've never had before - not to mention the last CD set was released clear back in 2006, and since then Toei's been slowly phasing out Kikuchi as the "representative DragonBall sound", for composers who sound more modern but much more bland and generic, so by now there's no real hope of Columbia ever showing the unreleased Kikuchi cues the light of day.

And DragonBall GT has a wonderful, heartbreaking score (by Akito Tokunaga). But only the music from the tenth-anniversary movie (which was also scored by Tokunaga, and which later was recycled in the TV episodes) got a CD release. Between DragonBall and Pokemon, why so much soundtrack bias in favor of the movies?

To put it in perspective, I once tallied up a rough estimate of how much music was composed for the original DragonBall (sans Z or GT or Kai), and got about 420 cues as my answer. And out of those 420, only 111 were ever released on CD... and even that was on a box set from clear back in 1994, so it's looooong out-of-print.

TerraEpon · **Joined:** Thu Sep 07, 2006 5:45 pm **Posts:** 785

Well, are you sure all of it was actually composed for the series?

Sailor Moon for instance used a lot of licensed music, not all of it classical music, even though there's a lot of cues composed for it (all of which were released on a 10 CD set).

kenisu3000 · **Joined:** Fri Dec 28, 2012 2:46 am **Posts:** 41

If we're talking about DragonBall and Pokemon, then yes, the instrumental score is pretty well self-contained and was composed specifically for its respective series.

There are a few exceptions, such as in the original DragonBall. There's a story arc where Goku winds up in Penguin Village from Akira Toriyama's previous series, Dr. Slump - and for three episodes, music from the Dr. Slump anime is used (which was also a Toei property, and also scored by Kikuchi). Also, there are a couple of rare cues that sound different from the rest of the series (such as when Goku first comes to Metro West to find Bulma, we suddenly hear "bustling metropolis" music that seems distinctly different from the rest of the score, and it makes me wonder if they were using some kind of stock music).

But other than that, there's not really any "outside" stuff until GT comes along, and even then it's just the opening and ending themes, written by J-pop artists of the time.

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Anime? (DragonBall and Pokemon)

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